


As Long As Stars Are Above You

by loverofthelight24



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Lydia is in love with Stiles, Lydia-centric, Mild Smut, Missing Scenes, Oblivious Stiles, Slow Burn, frequent mention of Allison Argent, minor Stalia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-16
Updated: 2016-03-16
Packaged: 2018-05-27 00:37:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6262501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loverofthelight24/pseuds/loverofthelight24
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knows she’s far gone past the point of ignorance and avoidance when she beams at him in an uncalculated, full-fledged instinctual way that Lydia has never been familiar with. With Stiles though, she finds it remarkably easy. He’s not shielding her anymore; he’s soothing the cracks in her soul with the honey that’s practically dripping from his eyes in a way that suggests that she doesn’t need to rely on facts nearly as much with him. She can be irrational, abstract, messy with him, and he will still be looking at her like she’s perfectly crystal clear. </p>
<p>Or, the five times Lydia tries to tell Stiles she loves him and the one time she did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Long As Stars Are Above You

**1.**

The first time Lydia feels the words “love” and “Stiles” simultaneously swim in her bloodstream is a simple event, really.

She’s sprawled on his flannel bedsheets (Stiles; ever the predictable one) in a Lydia Martin staple leather skirt and cherry tinted lips, only now both her guard and pair of mauve stilettos are long forgotten in the rightmost corner of his room. He’s attaching more red strings to pictures of things they shouldn’t know about at the age of sixteen, his hair sticking up in varying angles and worn eyes never wandering far from the mugshot of Barrow. She thinks it might give Stiles the satisfaction of catching him in some way, even though they had just returned from the high school after searching left and right for him all day with a glorifying, pathetic amount of _nothing_ resulting from it, despite the imminent screams mauling the edges of her throat that told her otherwise.

The car ride back to Stiles’ house is spent in uncharacteristic and concerning silence, which causes him to opt spending the rest of the night slurping milkshakes without straws while dipping their greasy fries into them and to just think, think, think. To her, it seems like a last ditch effort to make her feel somewhat important, like she wasn’t meant to idly watch bodies pile on top of each other every time she utilizes her “power.”

It’s nice, and it’s such a Stiles thing to do. But she’s Lydia Martin; she’s exhausted, she knows archaic Latin just as well as she knows classical Latin, and she also knows that it’s a complete and utter lie. She knows that he’s slowly realizing it too because he’s shielding her from reality; softening the blow in his flannel and red-string patterned world with strawberry milkshakes and always-open arms.

So she’s not surprised, or frankly cares when there’s a lack of Lydia-esque confidence woven into the syllables of her words when Stiles assures her that they’re "onto something.”

“Even though we couldn’t find any proof of Barrow being there?”

A picture of Eichen House falls onto the floor, but he doesn’t pick it up and hastily string it back together like he usually does.

Instead, he’s turned away from the board and openly staring at her, with mouth slightly agape, pupils expanding, and a mind focusing on how to string _her_ back together.

She knows the whiskey of his eyes is pouring into the moss of hers, and it’s combustible at best so she casts her eyesight at the once forgotten pair of heels in the corner of his room, wondering if she could’ve avoided the way Stiles is looking at her if she just kept them on.

_It’s all too much, it’s all too much…_

“Hey Lydia,” he says, his words softer and his stare harder. “You’ve been right every time something like this has happened, alright? So don’t start doubting yourself now.”

Suddenly, he’s crouched right in front of _his_ bed and _her_ and his stare is now focused on her hands, which are tangled in a stray red thread from the floor. He’s not even looking in her eyes anymore; instead admiring every vein and line of her fingers, but she’s looking at _him_ watching _her_ and it’s still all too much.

So Lydia Martin employs what she knows and does best; she states facts.

“No scent. No bomb,” she says, her voice and mental stamina straining between each word because being useless has become all too tiring.

“And I got you in trouble.”

“Okay, okay- look.”

Lydia Martin doesn’t obey commands; she’s the one who delivers them with an iron-clad fist (at least, she used to). A year ago, she would’ve spat right on his sacred flannels if the boy with a buzz cut, flailing limbs, and the unrelenting infatuation with her ever dared to rein her in. But he’s different; they’re different, and there’s something in his voice. Something about the method he uses to unravel the string that matches the color of her lips from her fingers. It’s slow, and it’s deliberate in the best way possible as the calloused pads of his fingers faintly graze the palm of her hand and she’s forced to look up at him.

If it was possible, she could swear his eyes are even softer than the touch on her hands.

“Barrow was there, alright? You knew it. You felt it. Okay?”

Her finger is basically wrapped around his pointer at this point, as he ties the lime-green sharpie he’s been holding with the string that’s been strangling her fingers together. She’s trying not to think of it as a symbol of him taking some of her pain away, because it’s too dangerous, too complicated, too much. But he’s fucking _boring_ into her and it makes her heart plummet into the pits of her stomach and erupt into this raging, messy inferno.

It’s what he says next that seals her fate.

“-And look, if you wanted to, I'd go back to that school right now and search all night just to prove it.”

She knows she’s far gone past the point of ignorance and avoidance when she beams at him in an uncalculated, full-fledged instinctual way that Lydia has never been familiar with. With Stiles though, she finds it remarkably easy. He’s not shielding her anymore; he’s soothing the cracks in her soul with the honey that’s practically dripping from his eyes in a way that suggests that she doesn’t need to rely on facts nearly as much with him. She can be irrational, abstract, _messy_ with him, and he will still be looking at her like she’s perfectly crystal clear.

She wants to tell him, but when the lime-green sharpie/red string object remains clasped in their hands and he's looking at her like she owns the sky and everything below it including himself; it instead compels her to wonder when being with Stiles Stilinski became “all too much” and “never enough” all at once.

 

**2.**

She doesn’t have time to tell him how she feels.

Instead, she’s standing over a buried black coffin in the ground that is the exact width and height of her best friend not even a month later.

She’s wearing the black cap-sleeved dress her mom lent her for the occasion, and it has a miniature floral silver pin just over her heart where it literally throbs with utter and complete agony. The funeral ended approximately 15 minutes before, with everyone attending barely being able to disguise their sniffles and sobs under the multitude of black shades, shuffling out in a haste once the service had ended. Scott left five minutes in, unable to contain his cries to a humanly acceptable noise level, and Lydia understands. But she cannot move. She is leaving her heart here, buried in the ground where Allison will be for the remainder of Lydia’s life and so after that. It’s impossible, it’s unfathomable, but it’s real.

_It’s all too much._

Lydia used to cry in the own private Idaho of her bedroom, into her vanity with concealer constantly at bay and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata drowning her sobs. But now, she doesn’t feel an inkling of energy to care. A sword went through her best friend less than a week ago and stained her lips crimson, and she’s _dead._ Her tattered San Francisco Giants crewneck is still slung over Lydia’s desk chair where she left it two weeks before, and she can never get it back. This makes her heart clench in means she couldn’t imagine prior to knowledge of the supernatural, and the ache causes Lydia to openly wail at Allison’s burial site. All she wants to do is collapse and join Allison underground once she realizes that no one, not even her dead best friend, had ever seen her cry like this.

Only Stiles, but he thinks she looks really beautiful when she cries.

The thought that she didn’t have time to tell her best friend about her newfound feelings about him is what finally sends her knees to the ground as she starts to claw at the freshly dispensed dirt. Her manicure is being ruined, auburn strands are spilling out of milkmaid braids, and her knees are marred with mud and bloody gashes which are beginning to resemble Lydia-sophomore year, but she needs to get to Allison. She needs to hold onto her, feel her hands rake throughout the length of her hair as she just sobs to her, saying, “It’s all too much, it’s all too _fucking_ much.”

But Stiles prevents her from doing so.

“Lydia! Hey, stop it,” she hears him command from a distance, sprinting to her before his arms tightly wrap around her frame as his chest presses against her back.

Normally, she would’ve downright melted in his arms if this was under any other circumstance, but she feels suffocated, trapped, and furious. She needs to get to Allison; what does he not understand about that? Immediately thrashing against him, Lydia digs faster into the ground with her hands as makeshift shovels as she flings patches of grass at the face that’s planted against her neck.  

“Get away from me! I need to be with Allison!”

“Lyds-“

“Get the _fuck_ away from me!”

She’s essentially hitting him now, with her body now facing him as she pounds her soil and grass stained firsts against his chest with her bare knees knocking against his pajama-clad ones. She’s not only upset about him stopping her from getting to Allison; she’s upset that he didn’t have the decency to show up for her funeral. More so, she’s enraged that he wasn’t there to stand next to her and tie a red string around their fingers as he whispered softly in her ear while she sobbed that he was there, and it’ll never be too much as long as he’s there beside her.

Because at this point, with her best friend dead and her sanity diminishing each second, Stiles is her only constant. And she cannot, no, will _not_ , go without having him in her life. It’s selfish, it’s unfathomable, and it’s real.

It’s too damn much.

“Lydia, _stop_!”

For some obscene reason, she obeys him once again. And she wishes she hadn’t looked up, because she instantly collapses, heaving into his chest like a long-standing routine once she does.

The bags under his eyes are black and blue like deep-set bruises, and the only thing that isn’t red in his eyes are the faded brown irises and blown black pupils. He’s physically exhausted and immensely sleep-deprived; that much is anatomically obvious from Lydia’s standpoint. But the look he’s giving is what makes Lydia desire to spiral further downwards into rubble.

It’s a look that screams _more_ at her, something that is undoubtedly an insurmountable amount of guilt and self-loathing. It’s as if he simultaneously empathizes with both her and Allison, wishing he was the one that had fallen into a dark enough psyche to even attempt to claw their way at the ground, and also wishing he was the one trapped in a coffin, only with his dimensions in mind instead.

A thought dawns on Lydia, and it alone urges her to wind her arms around him and peck his neck with gentle yet feverous kisses, mumbling “not your fault, not your fault” into the side of it.

And when he buries his head into her collarbone and begins to weep with her, she knows her suspicion is right.

She also knows that she actually and truly loves him; she loves Stiles Stilinski so damn much it could destroy her, and she silently prays to Allison that it won’t as he profusely and sobbingly apologizes into the safe house of her shoulder.

They stay like this for half an hour, with baited breaths, entangled limbs, and consoling whispers until they eventually settle on alleviating a bit of their misery with strawberry milkshakes and fatty fries at Allison’s grave. Hours later, as they’re lying on a patch of grass and Lydia seeking out the murmurs of Stiles’ heartbeat under his maroon t-shirt with his arm firmly wrapped around her middle, she wonders if somehow this is Allison’s doing in the afterlife as she gazes upwards at an orange and blue tinted sun.

When she turns to look at Stiles, who’s finally asleep in the crook of her neck despite the blemishes underneath his eyes that prevented him before, she knows it has to be.

 

**3.**

It turns out to be all too much for Stiles, in the most unconventional way possible.

It’s four months post-Allison’s death, and his hair is slightly longer, there’s more smiles than frowns on his face, and the witty comments he makes now remind her of a Stiles she never took the chance to know two years ago. Despite this, Lydia knows that these attributes are more theatrical than genuine.

She knows this because he calls both her and Scott every Thursday night at 11:43 P.M., because that’s the exact time and day of the week that Allison Argent died and they need to grieve together, even if they only do it on three different telephone lines within a 2-mile radius from one another at one designated time of the week.

However, this doesn’t stop Stiles from obtaining a girlfriend, lover, whatever-the-hell-label-they’re-going-with, named Malia. She’s a werecoyote with slim legs, bronze skin, a blunt mouth, and eyes that are both blue and brown.

The fact that her two eye colors don’t resemble her green ones whatsoever consumes Lydia like a belittling parasite.

It’s miniscule though, compared to what she feels when she sees them together.

They’re at his locker before first period on a Tuesday. Stiles is flailing about some new paranoid apprehension he has, and Malia is looking at her fingers like they’re some novel man-made invention. It’s relatively modest compared to what they’re usually doing at this time, so Lydia considers this to be a pretty good day as she marches up the hallway towards them in tan wedges and a rose-patterned skirt. Her hair is down with a braid pinned at the crown of her head, and she’s reminded that it’s Stiles’ favorite hair style of hers when he pauses his rant to wave at her. It’s only for a mere two seconds, but Lydia is pretty sure she sees him glow at her with all teeth when he notices the braid in her hair. She’s entirely positive that her floral and Chanel No. 5 façade melts as she beams right back.

For these two seconds, it seems like the most opportune time to confess to him. They’re both looking at each other like they did on the floor of the boy’s locker room almost a year previous; all longing gazes, red cheeks, and bitten lips, but it’s only two seconds.

And it’s not enough.

His backpack is shrugged off his shoulders, causing the collar of his plaid button-down to showcase a small patch of the skin on his neck. It’s only a couple seconds, but she can sense the bile in her stomach racing upwards and strangling her airway when she spots crimson and violet teeth and fingernail marks branding his collarbones; love bites she didn’t give him, and that Malia did.

Lydia Martin has been cheated on by two boys in her life, but she’s also had no problem two-timing them right back. With Stiles though, she doesn’t feel the familiar searing desire to seek vengeance against him. Lydia can usually solve her feelings by concluding them as results of excessive dopamine, noradrenaline or serotonin, but this sensation is so bone-achingly foreign that it downright pisses her off that she can’t put a name to it.

However, when he turns away, oblivious to her expression to whisper something in Malia’s ear with his right hand inching closer to the swell of her waist as she fucking _giggles_ , she knows for a fact that she just wants to disappear.

Scurrying away from the scene with tears burning the waterlines of her eyes, she realizes that she not only wants to cry; she wants to be grounded by Allison’s arms, feel her leather gloved hands comb the braided strands of her hair as she weeps to her, “It’s never enough, it’s never enough.”

Stiles doesn’t call her or Scott at 11:43 P.M. the upcoming Thursday. He blames it on an excess of AP Biology homework, but she notices the freshly blooming bruises on his collarbones Friday morning and feels smaller at each one that has Malia’s lip marks embedded in it.

A few weeks later, when they’re chained to a pole back-to-back in the basement of Eichen House and Stiles orders her to simply “focus on his voice” while Brunski plays the cassette of her grandmother’s suicide all in a matter of a few minutes; she doesn’t obey him.

Because in this day and age, any amount of time with Stiles Stilinski will always be “all too much” and “never enough.”

 

**4.**

Lydia is seventeen years, six months, and eight days old, but she’s positive she has experienced every form of pain listed in the books. She’s well aware that this is the exact age where she should be applying to the Ivy League colleges she’s dreamed of attending since she was still learning the periodic table, but it hasn’t even been a thought.

_I should probably wake up early tomorrow to start Princeton’s application,_ she thinks to herself nonchalantly.

This would seem like a perfectly normal Lydia Martin-to-self interaction, except for the fact that her stomach is spilling out liquid crimson onto the floor of the Sheriff’s office and Kira is pressing against the wound, failing to contain the blood inside her as she whispers, “please don’t die, Lydia, please hold on” with tears staining her cat-winged eyeliner.

It’s not that she’s not in pain; Lydia is in fucking _agony,_ so much so that she can’t get one word out without blood oozing out the corners of her pink-stained lips. The banshee side of her recognizes from the lack of bile and looming screams pooling in her gut that she isn’t going to die, but Lydia is only human at the end of the day, and she may forget it sometimes but she certainly isn’t now that she’s in such stupefying physical torment. It coerces her into tending to her mind, something she’s been neglecting for months now, because it always leads right back to Stiles.

Even though she knows she isn’t going to die, there’s still a colossal part of her that yearns for him to be here beside her, holding her hand like he’s done effortlessly so many times before and soothing her with copper eyes and a voice that's the sole melody in a world of dire crescendos. 

She shouldn’t expect this, because she knows Stiles as well as she knows the differing reactive properties of every element and how he handles the possibility of death.

However, Lydia doesn’t know how Stiles handles the possibility of _her_ death firsthand, until he’s standing like he’s paralyzed in the doorway with a gash and its blood covering the whole left side of his chest.

Kira is commanding her to “keep her eyes open” and focus on her, but all Lydia sees is Stiles. He’s looking utterly powerless, as he looks over her bleeding body over and over again to almost reassure himself that the once impossible thought of him not being by her side while she’s hurt, is fathomable and very real. With brown eyes doubling their original size, she can see that he’s trying his absolute hardest to look anywhere but in her eyes.

Because he’s certain he’ll collapse with one look at them, which are filled with both anguish (at the situation) and adoration (for him.)

Instead, he attempts to rush to her side like she aches for him to do, but Theo comes whizzing from behind him with a belt in hand, pushing Stiles and his ripped brown shirt to the background.

_What a shame,_ she contemplates. She liked that shirt. It brought out the amber quality in his eyes that aided her in falling in love with him that night on his bed, with the sharpie and red string.

As Theo tightens the belt around her like a makeshift tourniquet, she feels her mother stumble beside her and push her sweaty bangs behind her ears. _If she's not dying, why is she so sweaty?_

“You’re going to be okay, honey,” her mother promises her, but she’s also gasping horrified phrases like “oh,  _god”_ every time the tourniquet loosens around her middle and the open wound stains more of her blush-colored sweater.

She blinks once, and with that one blink her eyelids are falling heavy on her bottom lashes. The gag that sounds from the doorway in response is tragically audible, and it makes her want to cry because she felt the exact same when she watched the Nogitsune invade his body and kill him little by little, inside and out.

Lydia cannot cry though. She’s actually quite perplexed because Scott is shouting at Stiles to move to the basement where Malia, his girlfriend, is; but Stiles makes no effort to do so.

On the contrary, he’s raking over her figure like he’s trying to mentally take in every inch of her. Scott is still futilely attempting to move Stiles with words, and Theo is repeatedly reassuring him that she’s fine, but he still isn’t budging. She’s so tired, and if he’s going to try to, she doesn’t want him to remember like a weak girl who hemorrhages far too quickly and too much. She wants to him to remember her as Lydia Martin, a girl who has changed for the better.

“Stiles, I’m fine,” she assures, surprising herself with how hoarse her voice resonates outside of her own head. “Help Tracy.”

At that, he finally looks into her eyes. And the way his face both stills and crumples all at once terrorizes Lydia, because it’s an expression that screams “panic attack” and they’re not on the boys’ locker room’s floor mashing lips together to heal it. It’s all too much for Lydia, and she’s absolutely terrified that she’ll slip and say “I love you” if he doesn’t disappear from the doorway in the next few seconds.

So when Scott calls out to Stiles one more time in effort for him to leave, she agrees with him despite the fact that her heart is thumping manically, saying otherwise.

_“Go!”_

Instead of biting his head off with banter when he gives her an incredulous look that reads, _“Are you serious right now?”,_ she smiles. The banshee part of her that contends her consciousness is dwindling, and she wants Stiles to remember her like this if the human half of her should give in.

Smiling; beaming at him like she has for the past two years. Showing him that she is in love with him through rare soft grins and even rarer soft glances.

When he’s finally gone and she can breathe again, Lydia gives her last exhale before her vision fades into obsidian, selfishly wishing she would’ve just slipped all along.

 

**5.**

There's not a bone in her body that doesn’t ache.

She guesses that’s what happens when you narrowly escape death; you’re given back shallow breath and a beating heart, but all the repercussions of death still remain, including the physical ones. And the emotional ones.

Especially the emotional ones.

She’s witnessing this firsthand, sitting at the foot of her bed while Stiles fervently ravages through her closet like a manic animal.

It’s such a contrast, because here Stiles is throwing random objects and articles of clothing of hers in his Beacon Hill’s Lacrosse duffel bag, not showing the least bit of discomfort as he chucks her 34C lace bras and medium size thongs in the bag, and she might as well be catatonic again because she’s practically immobile.

Maybe it’s the disbelief of what has happened in the last hour; her barely escaping Eichen with a hole plaguing the side of her head, Stiles _pleading_ with her to just “wake up” and to show him her eyes, with tears scarring the surface of his own while she’s practically labeled a goner on the frigid steel table in Deaton’s clinic...

Her drawing her first breath after being injected with mistletoe and hearing Stiles shudder like he was scared of her; terrified of her never waking up.

Seeing the utter relief and lingering panic reside in the lines of his face as they both clasp onto each other’s hands, which reminds her of the lime-green sharpie/red string combination and, “if you die, I’ll go out of my freaking mind” all at once.

It’s a moment that lasts 10 seconds, tops. But 10 seconds is comparatively nothing in a 60 minute time period, and after that it’s all too damn much because she’s becoming rain and he’s been a full-fledged hurricane ever since they drove back from the clinic in a now all too comfortable silence.

Like clockwork, Stiles is the one to break it. 

“My aunt has a cottage on Lake Tahoe. She typically lives in it during the summer, and it’s February so I think we’ll be alright to go there. You know where Lake Tahoe is, right Lyds?”

He swivels to face her, and it’s so quick that her eyes have to take a second or two to fully adjust to his new position. He turns back towards her closet almost immediately, now stacking an assortment of both sundresses and sweatpants into the bag, but Lydia swears she can see that his right eye is visibly smaller and his left one is red, puffy, and twitching.

It’s a Stiles she’s unfortunately grown familiar with, and she hates it because she’s the one who’s been causing it lately.

“Of course you know where Lake Tahoe is, you’re only a certified genius,” he mumbles so quietly, she doubts it’s meant for her to hear. “Of fucking course you know basic American geography-“

“Stiles-“

He doesn’t stop. He only starts packing more sweaters, not bothering to fold them anymore.

“It’s really nice though. I used to go there all the time in the summer with my mom and dad as a kid. The downtown is cool too, there’s jazz festivals there every Thursday night. I know you love jazz-“

She does love jazz, but she hates Thursdays. It’s the day that Allison died. Lydia wonders when he forgot that, or if he did at all.

“ _Stiles_ , stop-“

He’s moving on to her lotions and perfumes, tossing them in two at a time. Some of them she hasn’t worn since middle school, and she knows that he knows it too.

“Do you know how to fish? If not, I can teach you. Lake Tahoe is kind of an exclusive haven for fisherman. It’s almost like a frat party, only with fish. That makes sense, right? Because-“

“Stiles, we can’t-“

There’s a straw that breaks the camel’s back, and then there’s a straw that breaks Stiles’. She figures out that was his straw, because the duffel bag is suddenly flung halfway across the room, his fists are beating against her closet door, and both of his eyes are red, puffy, and twitching.

“Don’t you _dare_ say we can’t leave,” he yells, his eyes wild and his heart pure. “Don’t you dare say we can’t leave the place that is fucking killing you!”

She doesn’t know what hurts more; her head, the fact that Stiles is right about Beacon Hills killing her, or that he’s openly sobbing in front of her, runny nose and all, _about_ her. One hand is clutching the side of his abdomen and the other is cupping his mouth as his eyes land on the toes of his beaten and blood-soaked converse, like he knows that they could never, ever leave Beacon Hills. Even if they were to flee to Lake Tahoe, Beacon Hills will always be there, stalking them like an eternal thundercloud.

Lydia has to ask herself if he ever forgot in the first place.

She’s unable to though, because tears are beginning to blur her eyesight but she still makes out a blue flannel and black t-shirt with brown hair and a gasping mouth hurling towards her. Before her vison is completely blinded, she feels strong, muscle bound arms tug her frail frame towards his chest, and the same gasping mouth of his is splaying a pattern of kisses throughout the entirety of her sopping, strawberry-blonde hair.

“I went fucking insane, Lydia, and you weren’t even really dead,” he hums into her neck, as he rubs continuous circles on the bare expanse of skin between the waistband of her sweatpants and the hem of her shirt. “I don’t know what I’d do if you were actually gone.”

Lydia almost laughs at the irony, because he has and hasn’t forgotten what he would do if she was to die. She stifles an oncoming inappropriate chuckle by softly biting the shoulder of his flannel, feeling the soft fabric soothe the arid atmosphere of her mouth. What a cruel, cruel world this is that she loves Stiles Stilinski, and the one time that’s both perfect and cliché for her to tell him is when she can barely talk. Bringing her stiff thumbs to clasp his restless ones against her waist, she gives herself space to really, truly look at him.

She doesn’t regret what she says next when she does.

“You’d go out of your freaking mind,” she whispers, her voice fading at each syllable. “And so would I.”

 

**6.**

Lydia doesn’t anticipate March 16th to be the day that she tells Stiles she loves him.

Sure, the birds are chirping, the grass is green, and the sun is blaring like 1800 watt lightbulb in a pitch black room. It’s even a few days away from her 18th birthday, and Stiles has been (not so) subtlety hinting at what her birthday gift is (it’s a bracelet, she saw the receipt tumble out of the backseat of his Jeep a week ago and grabbed it before Stiles could pause in his rant about Donald Trump’s candidacy for even a second). 

It’s a week later and the Jeep is in the shop with brake problems for the umpteenth time, so she’s driving him home from school until it gets fixed. When they’re driving home after school on March 16th, Lydia is arguing that that won’t be the case and naturally, Stiles is contradicting her.

“Roscoe always lives, Lyds. He’ll never die,” he says, all too comfortable with propping his shoeless feet on the dashboard of her car, regardless of the number of times she’s warned him about it being a hazard.

“Stiles, ‘Roscoe’ is a car,” she tries to rationally explain as she switches lanes to turn on Stiles’ street. “A 20-year-old one at that. And just like any car, its time will come-“

“His. “

“What?”

“You said ‘it.’ Roscoe is a ‘he,’ so with proper grammar in mind, _his_ time will come.”

Making sure there’s a stop sign ahead, she switches her eyesight from focusing on the road’s yellow-lines to full-on glaring at Stiles. But with his feet crossed on her dashboard, his flannel tossed in her backseat showcasing his body in a tight-fitting white tee, and him carelessly winking at her like he’s completely unaware of the things he does to her, she whips her head look in her rearview mirror so he can’t see how she’s lustfully biting her lip.

“You’re utterly infuriating, you know that right?”

She hears him chuckle lowly in response, and she doesn’t know when she started noticing every detail about Stiles, but literally _everything_ about him is causing her hormones to go haywire. She’d like to blame it on her prolonged abstinence period, but she’s an honest person and knows it’s because of his unnecessary flannels, the constellations of moles that speckle his chin and fade into the neckline of his shirts, the way his fingers run throughout his too-long of hair when he’s attaching red strings onto the evidence board, and so much more that has become all too much for her mind to bear.

She finds another reason, when he tells her:

“And you’re a beautiful genius, but you know that.”

The cord of sanity and faked indifference snaps inside her and she has to strain her knuckles against her steering wheel so she doesn’t jump out of her seat or him right there. She’s unusually ecstatic to finally pull into Stiles’ driveway so she can flex the fingers that are splotchy and red from gripping the steering wheel too tightly and also from total, unadulterated anxiety. _He probably didn’t mean anything by it,_ she tries to reason with herself. Lydia’s been called beautiful by a handful of boys in her lifetime, and she’s been called that by Stiles even more, so she is genuinely stumped why she’s so flustered by it this time. Maybe it’s because he hasn’t said anything remotely of the caliber ever since he and Malia have been together, or that her feelings for him have monumentally shifted since the last time he’s told her that.

Or maybe it’s the fact that he said it to her so effortlessly, without hesitation or apparent remorse as he’s more concentrated on chanting the random Yellowcard song that’s playing on the radio as his fingers thrum against the crimson denim of his pants. The color reminds her all too much of Allison, because her last memory of her is bleeding the same color. It’s a day away from being Thursday, and she so wishes she could tell Allison about how in love she is with the spastic boy beside her, so she decides to be sincere when she speaks.

For Allison, and for herself.

“Stiles,” she starts, not daring to look at his face as she plays with her fingers on the black fabric of her skirt. “You still think that?”

A few wordless, mute seconds go by, and Lydia almost wants to shout, “Ha! Just kidding!” and flip her hair behind her shoulders in a way that’s so exhaustingly typical of her, but the music on the radio gradually fades out into silence and a warm, calloused hand is grazing the tips of her fingers before she can, and she finds herself feeling relieved that she isn’t wrong for being vulnerable, _real,_ with him.

“Lydia,” he says, her name seeping off the edge of his tongue in ways she’s always ached for a boy to say it. “You can’t possibly think that I ever stopped thinking-”

The sentence cuts off before its conclusion when he sees how her eyes look down at her feet like a scolded child, and he shudders slightly while rubbing his free hand on her shoulder made bare by her white blouse because he suddenly realizes what she’s thinking.

“Lydia, just because Malia and I were together-“

_“Stiles,”_ she interrupts, because she waited two long, agonizing years to tell him this and she’ll be damned if he ruins her perfectly planned and endearing confession by telling her first.

When she glimpses at him under the fallen auburn strands of her hair, he’s smiling at her with both his eyes and lips while he delicately places the loose strands behind her ear, and when his hand remains there stroking her hair, she’s reminded that she’s adorning the hairstyle of hers that he loves. The anxiety snags at her throat like a fatal scream, but she steals another glance at the red of his pants and desperately wants, more than anything, to redeem herself to Allison.

Allison Argent used her last breaths to tell Scott McCall she loved him. Lydia Martin needs to use the first of many to tell Stiles Stilinski she loves him, because her best friend didn’t get to have that luxury. It’s possible, it’s fathomable, and it’s real.

And it will always be all too much.

“Stiles, I love you.”

In an instant, both of his hands still their movements, and it feels more frigid than warm. Before she can panic and tell him otherwise, she’s looking at him; holding his gaze with no surrender, and considers how his mouth is slack jawed in astonishment, and how his hands are still in their respective places on her shoulder and lap, not drawing back to his sides in disgust.

Thankfully, he speaks before she can fearfully take it back.

“W-well, this isn’t any reaction I’ve gotten before for calling a girl beautiful.”

This time instead of suppressing it, Lydia full-on _chortles_ because his reaction is _so_ Stiles that she doesn’t know why she didn’t forsee something like it in her two years of reciting the foolproof confession of love for him. When he promptly glows at her at the sound of her laugh and slides his hands down her arm and on her upper thigh, she can’t help but add to her admission.

“It’s not just because you called me beautiful,” she says, her laughter fading into a softer tone as she threads the fingers massaging circles on her thigh with her own. “I do for so many reasons, so many that I’ve lost count over the years, it’s ridiculous-”

“Years?”

Lifting her head up from their clasped hands, she nods slowly but surely at him. His mouth remains ajar for a moment or two, but then he’s launching himself out of his seat and over the console and _he’s_ kissing her, open-mouthed and hot with the hand that was on her arm now clutching her face for dear life, as if she’ll float away if he doesn’t.

She wants to make a joke about how in the ideal version of her plan, she was supposed to be the one to make the first move, but she can’t seem to detect any backbone to pull away when he’s drawing kisses from her lips like she’s made of raw, uncut gems and moving his hands under and behind the fabric of her skirt. They’re paying no mind how they are openly making out in his driveway, and it makes Lydia feel powerful, which is something she hasn’t felt in a while. More importantly, it makes her feel exorbitantly special, and undeniably loved. She’s adamant about giving back everything he’s giving to her, so she fits her lipstick stained lips between his two own and just _moves_ with him, trailing both her hands behind his neck and twirling with the hair at the nape of his neck.

“Say it again,” he demands against her mouth huskily, grasping the breadth of her hips, which have been made bare by the subsequent untucking of her blouse.

It’s hard to respond, though, when Stiles is touching and kissing her like  _this._

“Fuck, Stiles-“

_“Lydia,”_ he groans, but she’s knows it’s in false annoyance when he transfers his mouth from her own onto the side of her neck, soothing every bite he places there with the underside of his tongue.

“Say-“

He places a butterfly kiss near her earlobe, one that’s so light that she wouldn’t know it existed if he wasn't speaking to her through it.

“It-“

Tracing his lips in the grooves of her collarbones, he trails them downwards until he reaches the skin just above the deep V-neck of her shirt. When he marks her there with both lips and teeth, she both moans and swears. Loudly.

“-Again.”

“I love you,” she pants, gripping his hair and lightly scraping his scalp with her fingernails. “God, I love you so fucking much.”

And when they’re in his bedroom and he’s touching her like he’s taken the years she’s been in love with him to memorize every healed and unhealed scar on her skin, she knows he does too.

He says it more than her that evening; before, during, and after he moves inside her. It's alright though, because when he’s pressing his forehead against her own and looking at her like she’s the catalyst for everything good and holy in this world as she finishes; she realizes she can now say it as long and as often as she so pleases.

The next day is Thursday, and at 11:43 P.M. they’re bare and breathing into each other instead of grieving. Her head is laying against his bare chest as she traces the imaginary lines between his freckles, and when he’s kissing and whispering sweet nothings into her hairline with his arms wrapped lowly around her waist, she looks out the window and notices that the orange and blue horizon of the evening has transformed into a blanket of phosphorescent stars. She wonders which one Allison is.

Smiling against Stiles, Lydia mentally extends her gratitude to her best friend before she spends the first of many shared breaths with Stiles by saying it to him again, again, and again.

“Love you,” she murmurs, before ghosting her lips across the various spots of his chest.

When he grins into her hair and says it back, it becomes just enough.

 

                                                                               

**Author's Note:**

> (originally written for a stydia-fanfiction prompt at Tumblr)  
> My third Stydia fanfiction, and my favorite one thus far. This is my freaking OTP and the whole hiatus will be spent reading/writing fics about these two. If you ever want to talk about Stydia with me, want fic updates and/or want to see anything Stydia/TW related, feel free to message/follow me on Tumblr @stilesprefers-screamers and Twitter @loveroflight24! This hiatus is going to seriously kill me if I don't have anyone to talk about Stydia with.  
> As always, please leave kudos and/or comments if you enjoyed this! 
> 
> Much love as always :-)
> 
> Title is from "How Long Will I Love You?" by Ellie Goulding


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